(... and the BSD license)

Two comments about Romain's recent REJECT.

1. The specific case concerns a BSD-licensed source file. With respect to copyright notices BSD is rather peculiar, as can be read in the license text, at its second point

    Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above
    copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following
    disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
    provided with the distribution.
   

   So, the requirement of mentioning in debian/copyright authors (or, more precisely, all copyright owners appearing in a given source package) has nothing to do with DFSG, it is a requirement imposed by the license itself.

2. I actually don't think that « there is no will to do a move on this issue », quite the contrary. The last time the issue was raised (remember the giantic thread on copyright authors of several months ago?), I got the impression that there is a widespread will of getting rid of the burden of maintaining copyright lists up to date. What is not clear is whether, for licenses other than BSD, it is actually legally acceptable to do that.

   This issue is one of the pending questions that has been posed (by the DPL) to the SPI lawyer. AFAIK, no answer has been received yet. I "just" lack a bit more of visibility on these issues (e.g. a wiki page with pending queries to SPI lawyer) so that we avoid running in circles, as we are doing here.